#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.

IN MEMORIAM

We are never playing this game again,
Especially because I always lose.
And this morning,
the wager is breakfast.After all these years it seems
That scissor still beats paper,
Well, at least my jazz hands look cooler.

I sulk, as you dribble syrup
Strategically over the pancakes,
So that they wink and smile
And wag their tongues
At my reluctantly seated presence.

But it’s the coffee you pour that does the trick –
Two sugars and just enough cream
To win me over,
And in my favourite cup no less,
Picked out from the two dozen jumble
With the assured certainty
That never quite disappears,
Between old lovers.

The first pang comes
When without my asking,
You unfailingly pick,
The tomatoes off my plate.
It’s what you always did for me,
Since my confession that summer –
Impassioned, in the way
Only a teenager’s can be,
That I absolutely despised them.

How many afternoons did we squander you think,
That same sultry July?
Kissing in reckless abandon,
Under the mango tree in the schoolyard
We loved so dearly?

At long last,
The appreciation
Of how miserable I’ve been –
Obliged as it were
All these in-between years
To eat my own tomatoes because you’ve been gone.

It leaves me suddenly breathless
Like the crashing storms
We could get so drunk on,
Their baffling intensity
Staining our summers green.

And right now,
More than washing up
I want to lie beside you,
On the grass that grows by the stream.
We’d feed the ducks
And give them funny names
While the sun melts away the winter
Of years of discontent.

~Nisha Ravi